191: You Don’t Have a Process Unless It’s Written Down

The biggest thing that’s going to prevent you from being able to scale your business is your lack of processes.

Processes are a group of steps that make up a procedure for performing some kind of task. It’s how you do your work.

You don’t have a process unless it’s written down.

We’ve been guilty of this a lot. We do a lot of things here at seanwes that we have not created processes for. We know how we do a lot of our work in our minds, but that’s not the same as having written procedures.

You know how you do your work in your mind, but you end up skipping steps, making mistakes, and have no list of procedures to pass on to someone you hire as you grow.

Everything you do should have a process.

Processes should be written in a way that not only you can remember, but also so someone with zero knowledge of what you do currently can come in a perform the task to the same level of quality.

If you don’t have a team right now, this is good, take advantage of the time that you have before people come on.

If you already have a team, make creating processes a part of the responsibilities your team has.

This can be for when there’s not a lot of the main work, this is a project they can fall back on.

Processes are obviously valuable when you want to grow your team or bring people on board you can delegate tasks to, but you also need to think about emergencies. What if someone on your team got hit by a bus? What if they’re sick, show up late, or they quit their job?

You never know what could happen, but for your business to run smoothly, all of these things need to get done. If you don’t have processes written down, someone else will not be able to come in and pick up the slack.

The biggest takeaway—and the most difficult piece—is: you don’t have a process unless it’s written down.

We try to trick ourselves and say, “I know how to do my work! It’s up in my head,” but if it’s not written down, on paper, in a file, and listed out in steps, you don’t have a process.

This topic is one we’ll be going a lot more in depth on inside Hiring Bootcamp.

Overwhelmed, Overworked, and Need Help You Can’t Afford

If you’re like me, you started a business because you wanted freedom, but you end up feeling overworked, overwhelmed, and you’re exhausted. You have more work than one human can possibly do, and you need help. You need to delegate.

You need people on your team, but you can’t afford it. What do you do when you’re in this place where your business is doing well enough that you have so much work you can’t handle it all, yet you can’t bring someone else on to help? I’ve been in this place, and I was stuck. It’s basically a chicken and the egg problem. Which comes first? Do you hire people to help, or do you try to get more work to make enough money to hire people?

I stagnated for years. I let this problem waste years for me, and it ended up running my business into the ground. The business stagnated and I ended up selling it for way less than it was worth. That’s why I want to help you. Next week, we have a live three day workshop called Hiring Bootcamp. You can learn more and save 50% when you enroll at HiringBootcamp.com.

If you’re watching this later, we’ll have recordings of all three day sessions available at HiringBootcamp.com.

Build Something Bigger Than Yourself

You know you need help. You know you need to hire someone on your team. You know you could grow if you delegated, but you feel like you don’t have time to make this a priority. If that’s how you feel, this workshop is for you.